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The Black Friday Blues

It’s not that I don’t love a deal, I do, but Black Friday inevitably turns out to be an unintentional parade of my less than calculated pre-orders and earlier purchases.

It’s a whole lot of reality and a whole lot of realization that I could have saved a crap ton of money if I had only waited to buy the majority of the games in my backlog.

Case in point: Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness. I saw it on the PSN Flash Sale today for $20.

$20.

Even though I pre-ordered it through Amazon and took advantage of the 20% off for Prime members, I still paid $48. And I haven’t touched it yet.

Shame. Shame on me.

And the negative feelings didn’t stop there.

I saw that the remastered edition of Skyrim was on sale for $25. I had this pre-ordered from Amazon as well for, you guessed it, $48.

Have I played it yet?

Nope.

Now then, I could keep on running down the list of games that I saw for significantly less than I paid for them, but that would be depressing on various levels. What I should have realized was that I should wait on certain games until I am closer to having time to play them.

What I learned instead is that even though I have more games than I can feasibly play in a lifetime, I will still get mildly frustrated that the two games I was hoping to find on sale to buy (also, needlessly) were not on sale and that was unfortunate.

I will apparently never learn.

I belong to a group online (where we were all brought together by a Let’s Play of a really awful video game) where all day yesterday, people were posting images of the games they got on sale, and the more pictures I saw, the worse I felt about my lack of reasonable judgement when it comes to not pre-ordering every single game I’m interested in.

When I pre-order games, I do so under the guise of writing about as many of them as possible (and that’s genuinely true, incidentally), but really I’m just a greedy, greedy video game monster. I get so excited about so many games; I have every intention of playing them the moment they are released, but, in reality, there just isn’t time.

A while back I made a legitimate schedule for myself of playing games for so many hours a day, like a job, and it got tedious. You would think it wouldn’t, but it did. I sometimes wonder if I took games slightly less seriously if I would get to more of them.

Moderately deep thoughts.

I’m hoping that I can start to be a little more strategic (and, in turn, frugal) with my pre-orders, and then wait for sales for all the games I’m interested in, but won’t get to for a while. Hopefully I can turn over that leaf in 2017 and finally get my game acquisitions under control.

How do you feel about Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales? Do you stock up on games? Do you go into them looking for one or two particular titles? Do you avoid them all together? Or are you like me and just crumble when you see good deals on games you have interest in?

Let’s discuss.

I hope each of you had a lovely Thanksgiving. Please be safe out there this weekend. Cheers, friends.

Ah, I’ve had the exact same thoughts today! The sales only became “money I could’ve saved” rather than “money I’m saving.” I used to be stricter about only buying games that I would play straightaway. After this year’s game buying bonanza I’m resolved to buy less day one games (even with those 20% off deals) in order to buy more during next year’s Black Friday sales. In the meantime, I’ve so many games to play that I think buying less games will only do me good. Except for Mass Effect Andromeda, I can’t wait on that game.

For me, I usually buy one or two games that have held my interest; not enough to get them when they originally released. For this year, I have been looking at the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales, specifically to see those one or two games that I want at a discounted price. Here’s looking at Titanfall 2 & Mafia 3.

It depends on a game by game basis for me whether Black Friday sales leave me with buyer’s remorse. In your examples, I have purchased both Psycho Pass Mandatory Happiness and Skyrim Special Edition. With Psycho Pass, I don’t feel remorse since it’s from a smaller development studio that probably could use the day one sales and I consider it an investment in future products. With Skyrim Special Edition, the fact that it’s more than half off only having released less than a month ago makes me think that $25 should have been the starting price and leaves me feeling buyer’s remorse.

I definitely share the sentiment that I buy more games than I can reasonably play. That’s something I’ve been trying to work on and these sales really can shed light on patience being a virtue sometimes.